Copywriting for Instagram
Over the last two weeks, we’ve shared valuable copywriting tips that you can apply over your various social media platforms. We’ve talked about the best points to target when you are copywriting for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Today, we will talk about copywriting for Instagram. What are the important points to target in this platform?
In this post, you will learn another three techniques to make your Insta captions more engaging. These tips will help you create compelling posts on all your social platforms as well.
Fast Facts:
Instagram Audience: Positivity-seekers, influencers
Instagram users are a positive bunch. They are looking for happy posts with upbeat interactions and good stories. Instagram is a very visual platform and it is also a great place for great copywriting.
Instagram Post Length: 138-150 Characters
Instagram captions are longer than any other platform. They allow lengthy posts but don’t get carried away. The perfect caption length here is still just between 130-150 characters. Although this is the case, Instagram is a platform where its users post longer captions, almost like mini-blogs. And some are very successful in doing this. If you want to experiment with longer captions, this social media platform is the place to do it.
Instagram Hashtags: 10-11 per post
Instagram is the platform to get crazy over hashtags. The optimum number of hashtags you can use is 10-11 and you can use them to highlight words, get on with the trends, and make sure you show up on the search results. Generally, it’s preferable to separate your hashtags from your main caption. Some even put their hashtags on their post’s comment section. Hashtags on Instagram are almost like an additional list of keywords rather than being part of your photo caption.
Instagram (and social media in general) is really all about engagement. Here are three techniques you can use to make your copywriting for Instagram more compelling, and will help drive engagement on all your social profiles if applied well.
Be VISUAL
It’s not something new when you see how the photos on Instagram posts often do not correlate to their captions. It’s like having the images and caption being made by different people. Or sometimes, the caption is just a direct description of what you can already see in the photo without adding anything new or relevant, which is basically pointless. To have good copywriting for Instagram, your caption must go hand-in-hand with your image.
Example: Canva
Canva has a very visually and aesthetically pleasing feed, full of bright and detail-oriented photos. What particularly makes their posts stand out is that their images and captions work together. Their images include a little bit of copy that gets the viewer’s attention, giving them a sense of intrigue enough to prompt them to read the captions below it.
Be a Storyteller
In social media, storytelling is a very powerful marketing tool. And Instagram is the perfect platform for storytelling because it’s very visual and your caption for your posts can be a bit longer than any other. Copywriting for Instagram is made more enjoyable because of this.
Example: Outdoor Voices
This brand has a well-curated feed that tells snippets of what they are and what they stand for. Each caption has a relevance that goes along with the images and what’s really noticeable in their feed is that they value their audience. And their posts are varied so you can expect to get fresh content from them. As always, the number one tip when you want to incorporate storytelling in your marketing efforts is to focus on your customers. This is a clever way to showcase your product or service without making it all about you.
There are several ways to improve your storytelling on your captions. But as long as you make it all about your audience, there’s really no way you can get it wrong.
Make Spaces
To make your long captions more inviting and readable, format your text and add spaces in between them. A huge chunk of text is boring and intimidating so people will rarely read the whole of it. Space out your sentences, this will make them more accessible and reader-friendly.
Tool: Instagram Link Break
This is one of those apps that does exactly what its name says. Type in your caption, add line breaks to space it out and copy and paste it to your post to make it more readable.
This is a cleaner and more elegant way of typing your posts rather than using dots or dashes on each line.
Instagram may be all about aesthetically pleasing visuals, but that doesn’t mean that you can just neglect your copywriting. In fact, the positive vibe and trend for lengthy captions make copywriting for Instagram fun as you can incorporate storytelling techniques and be more experimental with your captions.
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